Tim Roth Won’t Be Bullied By Big Oil in Amazon’s Tin Star Trailer

Good cop Tim Roth makes a very dangerous enemy out of Christina Hendricks and a Canadian oil company in the first trailer for Amazon’s new crime drama Tin Star. The 10-episode first season becomes available on Amazon beginning Friday, Sept. 29.

In Tin Star, Roth plays a former British detective and recovering alcoholic who moves his family to the tucked-away Canadian Rockies town of Little Big Bear in search of a peaceful life. Trouble finds Roth when a huge new oil refinery opens in the town, bringing a flood of migrant workers and an attendant rise in drugs, gambling, and prostitution. Roth runs afoul of the oil company and soon finds himself and his family being targeted, which brings Roth’s buried dark side back out of hiding.

The majestic beauty of the Canadian Rockies provides the unlikely backdrop for gritty crime drama in the new Tin Star trailer from Amazon. Frequent Tarantino collaborator Tim Roth looks a perfect fish-out-of-water as an intense British detective amid the pine trees, but his old skills soon come into play when a dead girl is discovered in a car. It doesn’t take long before Roth is showing up at the door of the monolithic oil company that runs the town.

Roth’s investigation allows him to menace people as only Tim Roth can, but it quickly becomes apparent that the real enemy is the oil company that will do anything to protect its profits. “You’re asking me to destroy this man’s family,” oil company employee Christina Hendricks grimly intones. It’s a fair question which side should be more terrified: the lone cop standing up to an oil company and all the thugs its resources can buy, or the oil company that thinks it can take on Tim Roth once the stresses of his job (plus booze) bring out his very considerable and angry dark side.

We have been reminded this summer, thanks to his appearance as the murderous Hutch in Twin Peaks, that Tim Roth is one of our pre-eminent tough guy actors. Tin Star looks to be an unconventional but very interesting showcase for Roth’s intense dramatic talents, a sort of Northern Exposure that turns into a two-fisted crime-drama and then a revenge thriller as Roth’s world — and his psyche — begin to unravel under the pressures imposed on him as he tries to uphold the law in the face of corporate greed. And it’s always nice to see Mad Men star Christina Hendricks playing a woman you love to hate (she’s on the list of people who would be great as Poison Ivy).

Written by 28 Days Later and The American writer Rowan Joffe, Tin Star also stars Genevieve O’Reilly, Abigail Lawrie, Oliver Coopersmith, Christopher Heyerdahl and Stephen Walters.